How False Testimony and a Massive U.S. Propaganda Machine Bolstered George H.W. Bush’s War on Iraq — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
2. 0:04I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
3. 0:05Well, a national day of mourning has been declared following the death of former President
4. 0:10George H.W. Bush, who died Friday at the age of 94.
5. 0:14The Post Office and other federal agencies are closed for the day.
6. 0:18A funeral service for Bush is being held today at the Washington National Cathedral.
7. 0:23Former Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Bush’s son, George W. Bush,
8. 0:28will attend, as will President Trump, who was not invited to speak.
9. 0:33Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush explained why President Trump was not speaking by saying,
10. 0:38quote, “It’s because we have a unique circumstance here.
11. 0:41My brother was president.
12. 0:43First dibs, as we used to say.”
13. 0:45A second funeral will be held on Thursday in Houston, where George H.W. Bush will be
14. 0:51buried.
15. 0:52Well, we continue now to look back at the legacy of the 41st president.
16. 0:56Bush only served one term in the Oval Office, but the blowback from his 1991 invasion of
17. 1:02Iraq is still being felt today.
18. 1:05Although the Gulf War technically ended in February 1991, the U.S. war on Iraq would
19. 1:10continue for decades, first in the form of devastating sanctions and then in the 2003
20. 1:16invasion launched by George H.W. Bush’s son, George W. Bush.
21. 1:22Thousands of U.S. troops and contractors remain in Iraq today.
22. 1:27We look back now at a largely forgotten aspect of Bush’s war on Iraq: the vast domestic
23. 1:33propaganda campaign that occurred in the United States before the invasion began.
24. 1:38The story centers on a young Kuwaiti woman named Nayirah.
25. 1:42On October 10th, 1990, the 15-year-old girl gave riveting testimony before Congress about
26. 1:50the horrors inside Kuwait after Iraq invaded.
27. 1:55Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Nayirah, and I just came out of
28. 2:01Kuwait.
29. 2:02… My sister, with my 5-day-old nephew, traveled across the desert to safety.
30. 2:07There was no milk available for the baby in Kuwait.
31. 2:11They barely escaped when their car was stuck in the desert, desert sand, and help came
32. 2:18from Saudi Arabia.
33. 2:21I stayed behind and wanted to do something for my country.
34. 2:25The second week after invasion, I volunteered at the Al-Adan Hospital with 12 other women
35. 2:33who wanted to help, as well.
36. 2:35I was the youngest volunteer; other women were from 20 to 30 years old.
37. 2:41While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns.
38. 2:46They took the babies out of incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die
39. 2:55on the cold floor.
40. 2:57It was horrifying.
41. 3:01I could not help but think of my nephew.
42. 3:05Nayirah’s testimony was rebroadcast across the country and marked a turning point in
43. 3:10public opinion on going to war.
44. 3:13President George H.W. Bush repeatedly cited her claims.
45. 3:17They had kids in incubators, and they were thrown out of the incubators, so that Kuwait
46. 3:22could be systematically dismantled.
47. 3:25Three months after Nayirah testified, President George H.W. Bush launched the invasion of
48. 3:31Iraq.
49. 3:32But it turned out Nayirah’s claims weren’t true.
50. 3:36No human rights group or news outlet could confirm what she said.
51. 3:40It also turned out Nayirah was not just any Kuwaiti teenager.
52. 3:44She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasser al-Sabah.
53. 3:51She had been coached by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton, which was working for
54. 3:56the Kuwaiti government.
55. 3:57We’re joined now by the journalist who first revealed Nayirah’s identity, Rick MacArthur,
56. 4:03the president and publisher of Harper’s Magazine, the author of the book Second Front:
57. 4:08Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War.
58. 4:11I mean, so, you know, as we said, this is a turning point.
59. 4:16You have this teenager, this girl, saying she witnessed this, that Iraqi soldiers came
60. 4:22into Kuwait and ripped babies out of Kuwaiti incubators.
61. 4:26But she was only referred to as Nayirah at the time of the testimony; it wasn’t Nayirah
62. 4:32al-Sabah, so you would know that she’s the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, who also
63. 4:36testified in that hearing?
64. 4:38Correct.
65. 4:39That’s all part of the propaganda plan, is to maintain her anonymity to protect her
66. 4:47and her family against reprisals in Kuwait.
67. 4:51That was the cover story.
68. 4:52But, of course, nobody bothered to try to find out who she really was.
69. 4:56They just bought the story hook, line and sinker, even though at the time there were
70. 5:01a couple of human rights investigators who were becoming suspicious.
71. 5:05I got onto the trail after the war, unfortunately, and was able to run down what really had happened,
72. 5:12which was that Hill & Knowlton selected her as a persuasive witness to this atrocity,
73. 5:20and it was all part of a campaign to turn Saddam Hussein, at least in the public consciousness,
74. 5:29into Adolf Hitler.
75. 5:31And the feeling was that they couldn’t sell the Gulf War without this.
76. 5:36In other words, they had to cheat to win.
77. 5:38And that’s what interests me about the eulogies for George Bush.
78. 5:42He’s being presented now as this paragon of kind of WASP respectability and integrity,
79. 5:50old-school, when in fact he was a—had a violent side to him, a very angry and violent
80. 5:58and ruthless side to him.
81. 6:01And when you see him doing the propaganda, using the Hill & Knowlton disinformation,
82. 6:07you see a side of a politician that’s kind of ugly.
83. 6:11And we’re still—as Juan said, we’re still living with the consequences of our
84. 6:15having placed troops in Saudi Arabia, because that’s what sets off bin Laden, finally.
85. 6:20And, Rick, in terms of most people—it’s been over a quarter-century now.
86. 6:25Most people don’t recall the climate then.
87. 6:28But there was significant public opposition to the United States going into Iraq to beat
88. 6:35back the invasion of Kuwait, and the vote to approve the military action was very close,
89. 6:42wasn’t it?
90. 6:43So this was crucial, this kind of—this testimony.
91. 6:46Precisely.
92. 6:47You’ve got to remember, in 1990, '91, we're only—what?—15 years after Vietnam.
93. 6:52And there’s still this very, very bad feeling in the country, that’s represented in Congress
94. 6:59by senators like John Kerry, that we were conned into Vietnam, it was an undeclared
95. 7:04war, and we weren’t going to get conned again into another phony war or a phony pretext.
96. 7:12And so, it was clear that Bush was going to have to get congressional authorization for
97. 7:16invading—for liberating Kuwait.
98. 7:20And so, the vote was going to be very close.
99. 7:24It ended up being 52 to 47.
100. 7:26It would have been 52 to 48 if Alan Cranston, the senator from California, had come back
101. 7:31to Washington to vote.
102. 7:32He said he would have voted if it was close.
103. 7:35He was undergoing chemotherapy in California.
104. 7:38And it’s clear that, I mean, numerous representatives and senators cited the baby incubator atrocity,
105. 7:46which was false—it never happened—as a reason for voting for the Gulf War resolution.
106. 7:51In other words, these are people who said, “Well, look, we could figure out other ways
107. 7:56to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait—economic sanctions, negotiations.”
108. 8:03There was a feeling that this was about oil, it wasn’t about principle, even though Bush
109. 8:08posed it as a matter of international law.
110. 8:12But these people said, finally, “Look, if he’s really Hitler, if he’s really capable
111. 8:18of having an army that slaughters”—and it got to hundreds of babies by the time Amnesty
112. 8:24International gave its official seal of approval to the story.
113. 8:28Now, that’s—
114. 8:29Yeah, and I recall the front—
115. 8:30It was inflated.
116. 8:31It got even bigger.
117. 8:32That’s very, very important—
118. 8:33Yeah.
119. 8:34—about Amnesty International and the roll that it played.
120. 8:35Right.
121. 8:36Right.
122. 8:37It wasn’t just Nayirah.
123. 8:38Wasn’t just Nayirah.
124. 8:39Human Rights Watch fell for it.
125. 8:40They were neutral officially.
126. 8:42But Amnesty International actually put the number over 300 babies.
127. 8:46There weren’t that many incubators in Kuwait City hospitals.
128. 8:50Now, if you want to go back over the record, you’ll see how badly the media, how badly
129. 8:56the press failed in all this by not asking questions.
130. 8:58Well, I remember that my newspaper, the New York Daily News, had a front page: “They
131. 9:03killed babies!”
132. 9:04Yeah, yeah, yeah.
133. 9:05And so, the media uncritically accepted this story—
134. 9:07Sure.
135. 9:08—without any kind of check.
136. 9:09And if he’s a baby killer, then, well, you know, reasonable people can disagree about
137. 9:14how to enforce international law, how to prevent countries from invading other countries, but
138. 9:20we have to draw the line at baby killing.
139. 9:23And after the war—it’s not just me—it’s John Martin who did the really good reporting.
140. 9:29He went around to all the hospitals—
141. 9:32For ABC.
142. 9:33For ABC News—did what a reporter should do, unfortunately too late: interviewed hospital
143. 9:37personnel, doctors—did a very thorough job.
144. 9:41Nobody could cite one instance of a baby being pulled from an incubator by Iraqi soldiers
145. 9:47and killed.
146. 9:49There were babies killed because of neglect and because of the American bombardment of
147. 9:55Kuwait and of Iraq, because a lot of hospital personnel fled.
148. 9:59There were casualties.
149. 10:00There were infants who died.
150. 10:02But there were no babies killed by being pulled from incubators.
151. 10:06It never happened.
152. 10:08And this was, I think, as you note, the beginning of a new effort at the—or increased effort
153. 10:17at the propaganda campaigns of our government to justify war.
154. 10:23Right.
155. 10:24And this is something that hasn’t been explored enough.
156. 10:26Again, we go back to George Bush’s alleged WASP integrity and respectability.
157. 10:33Well, he’s also the father of George W. Bush, who took the propaganda campaign a couple
158. 10:41steps further with Saddam’s fake atomic bomb program—never happened, never existed,
159. 10:48in the time that we said it was going on.
160. 10:51He may have had ambitions before, but there certainly was no atomic bomb program in 2002,
161. 10:572003.
162. 10:59But we’ve now gotten so used to debating whether we should go to war or not based on
163. 11:06fake news—I’m sorry to quote Donald Trump—but false information, that we don’t know how
164. 11:12to discuss these subjects anymore.
165. 11:16And the war-making power has been taken out of the hands of the people, almost been taken
166. 11:20out of the hands of the Congress.
167. 11:22It’s almost quite—somebody said to me earlier, “Why did Bush bother to ask Congress
168. 11:27for permission to invade Iraq in 1991?”
169. 11:31Well, back then, we were still a little bit more of a constitutionally ruled country.
170. 11:39And there was this bitter memory of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and Vietnam and the fact
171. 11:45that we fought an undeclared war on false pretexts.
172. 11:50We’re talking to Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, author of Second Front:
173. 11:56Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.
174. 11:59The beginning of your book, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf
175. 12:04War, is—the first chapter is called “Cutting the Deal.”
176. 12:10And you start with a quote of Earl Shorris saying, “Some men are pleased to give orders
177. 12:16and some men are pleased to take orders.”
178. 12:17It’s really the beginning of the embedding process.
179. 12:20Right.
180. 12:21And explain this highly unusual meeting, August morning in 1990, eight days after Iraqi forces
181. 12:29invaded Kuwait, of the four, at the time—you know, the media landscape is so different—the
182. 12:35four Washington bureau chiefs of the major U.S. television networks presenting themselves
183. 12:41where?
184. 12:42Well, they present themselves at the home of Prince Bandar, who is the Saudi fixer in
185. 12:49the United States.
186. 12:50He’s the sort of majordomo of everything that happens Saudi-related in the United States.
187. 12:55And he’s the guy that the reporters have to ask for favors.
188. 13:01That’s who you go to for help, because the White House and the Pentagon had decided,
189. 13:08from the beginning, we’re not going to have another Vietnam.
190. 13:12In other words, we’re not going to have another situation where reporters are permitted
191. 13:15to go anywhere they want, take pictures of corpses, take pictures of burning buildings
192. 13:22or helicopters crashing.
193. 13:23We’re not going to—because the belief was—the revisionist belief was that we lost
194. 13:30Vietnam because the American public was demoralized by all the bad news coming back on CBS Evening
195. 13:36News and in Newsweek.
196. 13:38So we’re not going to let this happen again.
197. 13:40And the decision was made to pool reporters and to censor them.
198. 13:44In other words, you’d send groups of five to the front, wherever the Pentagon decided
199. 13:50the front happened to be that day.
200. 13:52They would get to take pictures and describe things, in theory, but their report would
201. 13:59have to be shared with everybody else—there’d be no competition—and it would have to be
202. 14:03vetted by Pentagon censors.
203. 14:06So, obviously, the American public saw nothing.
204. 14:10The reporters were permitted to see nothing.
205. 14:13And it was kind of comical, finally, to see hundreds of reporters in Dhahran, which is
206. 14:20where the press center was, recycling censored reports from the front which showed nothing.
207. 14:26There were two or three honorable reporters—Chris Hedges, Bob Simon of CBS—who went off the
208. 14:37reservation, so to speak, and saw a little bit, but these were the exceptions.
209. 14:42Susan Sachs from Newsday was another person who tried to do a good job.
210. 14:45Didn’t they go to the Saudi ambassador’s home, sent there by the Bush administration,
211. 14:50even though the Bush administration was sending soldiers into Saudi Arabia?
212. 14:56When it came to the press getting permission—
213. 14:59Right.
214. 15:00—they said, “You’ll have to get permission from Saudi Arabia.”
215. 15:02Well, this was a way to lobby the Saudis for favors.
216. 15:05It was still going to be the Pentagon that decided who got to go where when.
217. 15:09But the feeling was, among the networks, was, if we can get Prince Bandar to cut us some—give
218. 15:16us some—do some favors for us, cut us some slack, maybe he can use his influence with
219. 15:21the Bush administration to give us better access than the competition.
220. 15:27And this brings us back to the present day.
221. 15:30I mean, we’re in bed with the Saudi Arabians, going back a long way.
222. 15:34And the idea of the American media begging for favors from a Saudi prince, well, it’s
223. 15:42an ugly—it’s an ugly image.
224. 15:43And it also speaks to the hypocrisy of the American media, back then and still today,
225. 15:50about the First Amendment.
226. 15:51I mean, there were a group of us that sued the Pentagon.
227. 15:55Sydney Schanberg and The Nation and Harper’s Magazine, we sued the Pentagon over this.
228. 15:59We lost.
229. 16:01And—over the censorship plan.
230. 16:03But for the most part, Katharine Graham, Sulzberger, the heads of the networks, they didn’t do
231. 16:10anything.
232. 16:11That’s all in my book also.
233. 16:12You can see the—you can see what they said about it.
234. 16:15We’re talking to Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, author of Second Front:
235. 16:16Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.
236. 16:17We’ll be back with him in a minute.
237. 16:18“Combat Rock” by Sleater-Kinney.
238. 16:19And a shout-out to today’s class visiting Democracy Now!, Marymount Manhattan College.
239. 16:20This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
240. 16:21I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we look at President George H.W. Bush’s
241. 16:25legacy when it comes to war, particularly the Iraq War.
242. 16:29Juan?
243. 16:30Well, Rick, I wanted to ask you, following up on what we were talking about, about the
244. 16:36agreement of many of the major media companies to go along with the censorship protocols
245. 16:42of the Pentagon in the war.
246. 16:45Ironically, this was the first televised—live televised war.
247. 16:49And those of us who remember the pictures of the bombers hitting different parts of
248. 16:56Iraq and Kuwait—so, you had his irony of, on the one hand, there was censorship and
249. 17:05control; on the other hand, it was a televised war, so that the American people got this
250. 17:09idea of these precision-guided bombs that the United States was unleashing on the Iraqi
251. 17:15forces.
252. 17:16Right.
253. 17:17Strictly speaking, it’s not the first televised war.
254. 17:18You could say Vietnam is the first televised war.
255. 17:20But—
256. 17:21Live.
257. 17:22Live televised.
258. 17:23But live televised war, yes, in the sense that you have these long press conferences,
259. 17:28if you can call them that, run by Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of the—the overall commander
260. 17:34of the allied forces, as they were quaintly called, who turns out to be a brilliant PR
261. 17:41man.
262. 17:42And what he understood was, it’s better to talk over the reporters at the press conference
263. 17:47and show pictures in real time, if possible—sometimes in real time, sometimes they were videotapes—to
264. 17:54show what the Army was allegedly doing before anybody could check it out.
265. 18:00So, he brilliantly—I mean, it looks very old-fashioned.
266. 18:04He’s got a television set, set up on the stage in Dhahran, showing allegedly precision-guided—precision
267. 18:13missiles hitting their targets every time, to make people—give people the feeling that
268. 18:18the American Army is invincible.
269. 18:20Let’s turn to the U.S. military commander in charge of Iraq, who you’re referring
270. 18:24to—
271. 18:25Right, right.
272. 18:26—General Norman Schwarzkopf.
273. 18:27During a news conference January 31st, 1991, he explains how the U.S. has been targeting
274. 18:32Iraq’s Scud missiles.
275. 18:34Last night in western Iraq, we also attacked and destroyed three Scud TELs with F-15s,
276. 18:40and I feel we preempted a missile attack on Israel last night.
277. 18:44Now, I certainly can’t say there will be no more Scud launches.
278. 18:50You can never say that.
279. 18:52But I have a high degree of confidence that we are getting better and better at our ability
280. 18:55to find them, and I think this tape speaks for itself in our ability to find them and
281. 19:00destroy them.
282. 19:01That’s Norman Schwarzkopf, General Norman Schwarzkopf.
283. 19:04Right.
284. 19:05And the day before, actually, they showed pictures of them, of the United States Air
285. 19:10Force, allegedly blowing up Scud missile—mobile Scud missile launchers, because at that point
286. 19:17people were very upset and frightened that the Iraqis were going to hit targets in Israel.
287. 19:22They did get a couple of Scuds through the defenses into Israel.
288. 19:28So they had to have results.
289. 19:29They had to show that they were taking out the Scud missile launchers.
290. 19:33And so they claimed to have knocked out 11 of them.
291. 19:36After the war, Scott Ritter and Mark Crispin Miller did some good reporting and refuted
292. 19:41this, said that no Scud missile launchers were blown up.
293. 19:46But the—mobile Scud missile launchers.
294. 19:48But the point is, is that in real time, the press, the media, could not challenge anything
295. 19:54that was said.
296. 19:55Here’s the video.
297. 19:56Here are the generals with their pointers.
298. 20:00How can you argue with this?
299. 20:01And there’s nobody on the ground, no reporters in the field, who can verify anything or contradict
300. 20:09anything.
301. 20:10It’s not easy even under the freest circumstances in wartime to confirm or refute what the government
302. 20:17says.
303. 20:18But there’s zero chance in this war.
304. 20:21So the American public gets the impression that it’s a clean war, a sanitized war;
305. 20:27we’re hitting every target.
306. 20:28One of the great statistics to know is that 93 percent of the tonnage dropped on Iraq
307. 20:35and Kuwait in the Gulf War was conventional dumb bombs, most of them from Vietnam-era
308. 20:41B-52s.
309. 20:43Only 7 percent of the tonnage fired were laser-guided missiles, which is what they’re talking
310. 20:50about here.
311. 20:52So it’s–
312. 20:53So, it’s possible to say that it was under George—
313. 20:54Yeah.
314. 20:55I mean, George Herbert Walker Bush that the United States government perfected the propaganda
315. 21:01control of media coverage of the war.
316. 21:03Yes.
317. 21:04And none of these things are new.
318. 21:05In other words, if you go back to World War I, you’ve got Belgian babies were being
319. 21:10bayoneted by the Germans.
320. 21:12I mean, it’s an old—it’s an old propaganda trick.
321. 21:15So, killing babies has been used before.
322. 21:17But in terms of actual technical sophistication, using the latest media technology to subvert
323. 21:26democracy and to manipulate people and to make them feel good about the war, ultimately,
324. 21:34Schwarzkopf, CENTCOM, Pete Williams at the Pentagon and the Bush administration, this
325. 21:40was the pièce de résistance.
326. 21:42Your final thoughts, in the last 30 seconds, on the review of President George H.W. Bush’s
327. 21:48life that we’re seeing in the media today?
328. 21:50Well, I’m horrified.
329. 21:51There was a column in The Wall Street Journal yesterday by William McGurn headlined “George
330. 21:57Bush’s Wonderful Life,” where he literally compares him to George Bailey in It’s a
331. 22:02Wonderful Life, which is crazy on its face, because George Bailey is a kind of populist.
332. 22:07He’s opposed to the power of Mr. Potter and his bank and so on and so forth.
333. 22:13But George Bush was not a peace-loving guy.
334. 22:16I’ll never forget George McGovern saying to me—and George McGovern—
335. 22:21We have 15 seconds.
336. 22:22—having been a bomber pilot in World War II—saying, “You know, most of us came
337. 22:27back from World War II—most of us who came back from World War II had had enough.
338. 22:32Bush didn’t get enough, didn’t get enough violence.”
339. 22:35We’re going to have to leave it there.
340. 22:38Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, author of Second Front.